Aircraft and spacecraft are widely used for transportation of people or materials, but are subject to mechanical failures and pilot errors often leading to catastrophic crashes, collisions, and breakup. Aircraft and spacecraft have crashed on the surface of the earth. To correct mechanical designs or to understand why a mishap occurred, so as to prevent future mishaps, it is desirable to fully understand critical events leading up to the mishaps. Critical events leading up to a crash often reveal indication for the accident so that corrective steps can be taken. Hence, it is desirable to record for subsequent analysis, data revealing those critical events.
Aircraft have long used black boxes as in-flight recorders of operational and telemetry data for subsequent recovery, use, and analysis. The black boxes are typically recovered after a crash. The black boxes are designed to survive a crash and are made of strong durable materials with heat protection. One problem with black boxes is that they must be found after a crash, where the debris track from the crash may extend over several miles, or may be unrecoverable at the bottom of an ocean. To solve this problem, sound or broadcast beacons can be used to assist in locating the black boxes after a crash. However, such a beacon may not be effective where the black box ends up at the bottom of an ocean. Another problem with black boxes is that the black boxes may be damaged during the crash, requiring repairs of the black boxes so as to be able to adapt the box for subsequent off loading of recorded data. Yet another problem with black boxes is the repair of actual magnetic recordings recorded on magnetic media, in which the data can be corrupted by a damaged black box. Elaborate data recovery methods are used to recover the in-flight data. Yet another problem with black boxes is the inoperation of the black boxes after disintegration of the aircraft, during breakup of the aircraft, when the black box ceases recording data by severance to sensory inputs, thereby limiting the amount recoverable data to prebreakup sensory data. Black boxes are used on aircraft having communication systems, but black boxes do not broadcast sensory or telemetry data after breakup. Black boxes disadvantageously require after-crash location, repair of the black box data storage medium, black box data recovery, with data limited to prebreakup sensory inputs, so as to off load the limited in-flight data, so as to reconstruct the critical events for preventive analysis.
Spacecraft are also subject to collisions with space debris, pilot errors, mechanical failures, and natural orbital decays, leading to eventual crashes on the earth's surface. Here, however, the debris track may extend hundreds and possibly thousands of miles, such as in the Shuttle Columbia crash. Such extensive debris tracks render locating spacecraft black boxes impracticable especially where there is a high probability that the spacecraft will crash into an ocean, rendering the black boxes unrecoverable. During reentry, tremendous heat is generated on the surface of a downwardly tumbling breakup spacecraft, which effectively destroys all onboard systems. As such, spacecraft often use onboard in-flight sensors and communication systems for continuous transmission of sensory and telemetry data to a ground recording system. In-flight systems do not generally broadcast telemetry data in an omnidirectional mode, but rather communicate the data to a specific ground station for real time recording. One problem with this continuous transmission method is that the communications downlink fails when the onboard sensors and communication systems disintegrate during breakup. No in-situ data is received from which the breakup characteristics of a reentering spacecraft object may be derived.
With an ever-increasing number of space objects in orbit, with inherent orbital decays, there is an increasing probability that spacecraft may possibly cause damage to property or injury to people. It is desirable to fully understand when and where breakup occurs and how a spacecraft disintegrates during breakup and the possible trajectories of breakup debris. However, the continuous communication method disadvantageously ceases functioning during breakup and does not provide breakup time sensory and telemetry data. Both aircraft black boxes and spacecraft communications systems are directly tied into onboard remote sensors as active data collection systems, rendering these active data collection systems subject to destruction during craft breakup precluding the collection of data during breakup. These and other disadvantages are solved or reduced using the invention.